Mortal Destiny
by The False King
Summary: Ash is no expert trainer. He's a rookie that recently set out on a journey with his pokémon partner and a dream. But peril awaits him on the road - vengeful criminals and ancient monsters are only the beginning. Ash may be no expert trainer, but if he wants to finish this journey with his life, he'll have to become one. Dark reboot of the animé. Different starter and smarter Ash.


A/N: Hey, welcome to _Mortal Destiny_. When I set out to write this, I aimed to create a more realistic, less kiddie version of the animé. This of course means that this story will be a shade darker than the canon pokemon universe. Ash will be a great deal more competent, as will his rivals and enemies, as it would have been if they geared the series towards teenagers.

I'm not a fan of heavy angst, nor constant major character death, so those of you uncomfortable about the dark label shouldn't be alarmed. Realistically violent crime syndicates, human suffering, unsavory characters and the rare important death are the reason this story is termed dark. It'll be worse, but not too much worse than _Traveler _by The Straight Elf, and definitely lighter in tone than _The Sun Soul _by 50caliberchaos.

Enjoy your read, and let me know any thoughts or suggestions you have when you finish. I welcome input, and I would like to know how I did to better guide the direction of this story.

* * *

Chapter One: The Day Is At Hand

It was the first day of the Indigo Conference and so, today, someone would die.

Even early July morning, the sun dampened t-shirts and mobbed the stands of the Indigo Stadium with vibrant pink and yellow parasols. Ash, only eight, was standing on a steel bleacher near the back of the stands, craning his neck to see above the people still searching for seats in the row in front of him. His mother tugged on his shirt, urging him to sit down.

"Don't worry, Ash, you'll be able to see when the battle starts," Delia said. "Be a dear and stop bothering the people behind us."

Ash kept his eyes trained on the empty field, making no move to do as his mother asked. "Can we get a seat closer to the front?"

His mother sighed.

Ash lived and breathed pokémon, and Delia had always complained that he was addicted to the television whenever a tournament was on. His mind would race as he tried to predict a trainer's next move before they knew it themselves. He had been begging his father for a pokémon during holiday video calls since he had first seen a pidgey hopping outside their window. He felt alive watching a battle between experts and a pulse of adrenaline witnessing the elemental titans of pokémon at work.

So today, today his every nerve was singing. The pokémon here would be more than just pixels on a television screen or a page in his pokémon encyclopedia; they would be monsters in the flesh. What was more, his father would be competing.

Ash knew he understood the mechanics of pokémon battling better than his father – he was the one who had read the fifth edition of the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Pokémon Weaknesses_ after all – but he trusted him. He must have learned something in all those years he had traveled without him and Mom.

The Pokémon League anthem soared out over the crowd, signaling the battle's imminent start. Ash's focus funneled to the dusty field far below. The rest of the world faded out around him.

There was only the battlefield. Two trainers emerged from the stadium tunnels on opposite ends, their gear glinting in the sunlight. Ash squinted and identified the man with the blue band tied around his arm as his father. He knew that under Indigo Conference rules, each trainer had been assigned a color – blue or red – before the match began. The red trainer would be the first to release his pokemon.

The announcer's voice boomed over the roar of the crowd, and the man with the red band tossed a pokeball into the air. He was unremarkable. His pokémon was not.

The immense shadow of a nidoking covered nearly half the battlefield. Its low growl was enough to stir the dust around it into billowing clouds, causing its trainer to lift an arm to shield his eyes. Froth dripped down the corner of its mouth, hiding the teeth that would tear into losers.

To Ash, it was magnificent and deadly, a creature to be feared and loved.

Pitting pokémon against each other in battle naturally had a degree of violence to it. It was a testament to the strength and resiliency of every pokemon that they were able to endure blows that would be fatal for humans. But there were still rules surrounding battles in the modern world, such as the prohibition of using moves that a trainer knew would kill the opposing pokémon.

Conferences were the exception. Ancient in origin and bound in tradition, the rules for the conferences were the same as they were hundreds of years ago when the torch was first lit with the flame of Moltres. There was one certainty in Ash's mind as he took in the nidoking – his father would face trouble if his pokémon could not match its strength. For the only rule once the battle commenced was victory.

He stiffened as he watched his father release his pokémon in a flash of red. He had watched trainers throw their pokéballs into the air before, and they usually caught it in its arc back towards them with a steady hand, but not this time. His father's fingers were clumsy, and Ash knew he was afraid of the nidoking.

A gengar floated into the air above his father, whom looked small and dark next to the ghost. Ash wondered if his father's eyes were flicking from the gengar to the nidoking right now, a tightness in his jaw similar to whenever Ash asked if he would come to visit.

The announcer shouted again, and the scoreboard lit up with the profiles of the two trainers. The first match of the Indigo Conference had begun.

It did not last long.

It was only minutes into the battle when the nidoking seized Ash's father by his arm and then his chest.

For one moment, the crowd did not roar and the flock of wingull in the skies did not flap and the breath in Ash's lungs did not escape.

Then the nidoking tore his father from his uneasy position against the south wall of the field.

The nidoking could not keep its battered grip on his father's chest, and his father fell to the dust, already ruined before the teeth could get to him. He was clad in a ballistic vest, so it took a long minute before the nidoking tore through, finished its work and Ash could see him again. By then, he was a long black-and-scarlet smear.

The red trainer stared at the thing that was Ash's father for a heartbeat before making a "V" with his fingers and holding it up to the crowd. A lukewarm cheer rose up from the stands; he had won, but his victory was cheap.

It was not the body strung out through the reddening field that Ash remembered later that night. Instead, he remembered his father as he was before the battle – afraid.

He wouldn't make the same mistake.

~O~

"Mister, you wanna buy – "

"New shipment of clefairy in – "

"Raw and fresh slowpoke tails sold in bulk – "

Ash's life had gone to hell in the five years since that day.

He tightened his grip on the fistful of cash in his pocket and hurried forward, his heart beating a staccato, leaping into his throat whenever a passerby brushed against him. It was hard for him to forget that many down here were sharpedo, eager to cut people open at the slightest whiff of cash. Harder when he was the one with money.

The black market thrived where the light failed. Shadow people bobbed through the darkness, jostling past tables selling needle assortments and powder made of venomoth scales. Twine criss-crossed above his head, strung with bulbs plucked from mareep tails that emitted a dull golden glow. Jittery teenagers, high on lucid cube, would sometimes leap up and knock the string of bulbs to set them swinging, casting looming and swooping shapes over the crowd.

Ash had heard that the underground tunnels now occupied by the black market and refugee camps were the legacy of an abandoned project to engineer a subway system beneath Saffron City. The deep reaches of the black market's domain, where the pokémon hunters lined up their caged captures for sale, was supposed to have been the central terminal.

And that was where he was now headed. His years of careful saving combined with the lowered rates of the black market meant he could finally afford his first pokémon. He could finally realize his dream.

That dream was a charmander.

The crowd began to thin as the tunnel opened up to a wide, cavernous space. A hooded man in a tattered jacket was sprawled casually against an empty cage near Ash, and in the distance Ash could see several stacks of cages separated in clusters with people walking between them. There had to be hundreds of pokémon for sale here.

Eerily, he couldn't hear any of them. The dark air smothered the quiet murmurs of humans in the distance, and silence settled around him like a heavy shroud.

Life was missing.

"You have the money to be here?"

Ash started. The hooded man was now sitting upright. His body was taut and there was a slight tremor to him that reminded Ash dangerously of lucid cube.

He resisted the urge to touch the money in his pocket. "I'm looking for charmander."

The hooded man grunted and slumped back down. "Head for the rightmost stack of cages on the opposite end."

Ash nodded but didn't linger.

His distorted shadows stretched over the cage stacks as he passed them. Ash couldn't help glancing from side to side at the cages, and with some disappointment saw that most of the pokémon were concealed by the darkness at the back of their cages. It took a noctowl collapsed against the bars with cloudy eyes for Ash to realize they had been sedated. He felt his stomach twist and increased his pace.

Then there was noise.

It was deafening, cutting through his head and reverberating with a force that caused the ground to move in waves under his feet and his body to shake. He took a few steps and somehow wound up on his hands and knees, and he choked for a moment, completely dazed, struggling to inhale. His fingers were gashed from scraping the ground, tiny, long rips of skin cleaved off their lengths and red welts welling up from beneath. Ash added his own hiss of torment to the hell symphony around him.

A metallic clatter and the blast of sound ended. Ash raised his head after the ringing in his ears quieted and realized a pokémon hunter nearby him had overturned a cage with a violent kick, a trembling purple lump inside it.

The hunter had his fists in a ball and was staring at the cage. "Damn addicted monster."

Ash pushed himself weakly to his feet and closed the distance between himself and the hunter. "That – the pokémon in the cage did that?"

The hunter nodded. His eyes remained fixed on the overturned cage.

"But the rest of the pokémon here . . . " Ash shook his head. "Why isn't it sedated?"

There was a low, lightly amused chuckle as the hunter turned and appraised him. Ash wondered how much he could discern in the darkness, if the hunter saw in him the typical refugee living in underground Saffron. The dark, feathery hair and facial structure that revealed his western Kanto ancestry. The rapacious, but wary look reminiscent of a starving houndoom, with quiet madness and desperation lurking beneath the surface. Without his jacket, Ash knew his body had a lean look to it – as if he worked too long or ate poorly.

In any case, the hunter must have decided there was no harm in speaking to him. "There's no sedating that one. Trust me, kid, sedatives and neurotech are not a cocktail worth trying."

"You mean it's addicted to neurotech?" Ash asked, unable to conceal the note of surprise in his voice. He had heard of neurotech before and knew it wasn't cheap. There weren't many swimming in money in the Saffron underground, but those that did used neurotech to refine their pokémons' strength and precision to deadly levels. Ash had once witnessed a marowak raised on neurotech battle in the fighters' ring, and it was a tyrant of the battlefield, capable of feats Ash had thought physically impossible for its species.

But like every drug neurotech had its element of risk. Neurotech interfered with a pokémons' genetic make-up, which always had a high chance of destabilizing evolution and causing sickening mutations. Ash had sworn never to let his future charmander near the stuff. It was meant for trainers that treated their pokémon like tools, and had plenty of other pokemon as backup if the one on neurotech had its body wracked by awful changes.

The hunter flashed his teeth at Ash's surprise. "Yeah, its first owner was taken during a police raid and one of my associates in the force got it to me, already drugged up and addicted. I've been trying to break the monster of its addiction since." The hunter's voice became a low growl. "And all I've got to show for it is lost cash. Neurotech burns through my money like it's doused in gasoline, and I'm getting close to spending more on the monster than its worth. Can't even sedate the thing to get a little peace either."

Ash threw a glance at the overturned cage in shuddering fascination. The steel-plated base was now where the side of the cage normally would have been, hiding the pokémon from view. Lying on the ground beside it was a twist of wire. To secure the cage door? He looked down at the red on his fingers and images flashed through his mind in a rising panic of what else this pokémon must be capable of. "Um – "

"I should just feed it to my rhydon. More cost effective," the hunter mused.

Ash would have paled, but he didn't have the time.

A flash of purple streaked from the cage and in an instant sharp pricks punctured through Ash's t-shirt and into the flesh of his back. Ash froze, feeling his heart rate spike within his chest.

The hunter laughed. "Relax, it's just clinging to your t-shirt. Give me a moment and I'll pull the thing off.

Ash spoke slowly, trying not to disturb the pokémon tearing into his back. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

"It's never been trained in its life; even if it wanted to it couldn't do much damage. Now hold still," the hunter said.

The hunter circled around to the other side of him. Ash kept his muscles from twitching as he heard a high-pitched cry from the pokémon and a muttered "obstinate bat." He expected to feel the unfamiliar weight removed from his back, but only felt tiny claws dig in deeper.

And deeper. The tussle went on for a long minute, with Ash wincing at the sting of ripped skin. The pokémon whined and squeaked, clinging to Ash with a determination stronger than the adult male wrenching at it. But gradually the claws were loosening.

Then, "Gotcha," and the weight was gone.

When Ash turned around, his heart seceded from his plan to buy a charmander. The pokémon before him wasn't at all what he had expected. The hunter's hands were wrapped around the body of a small purple bat, whose head was poking out above his fingers. Its oversized ears were flopped over each other, and its golden eyes were frantic as it stared at Ash.

It was trembling in the hunter's hands.

"You're not really going to feed him to a rhydon, are you?" Ash tried, his heart conflicting with his reason. A charmander would grow to be a charizard, a powerhouse, a reliable investment, a dragon he could achieve his dreams with. And this –

"This is a noibat, kid," the hunter said. "The zubat of the Kalos region. No real loss."

Ash swallowed. He knew that not everyone could be saved. But when he had a chance to avert a death sentence, could he forgive himself for just walking away? Would he be able to look at his charmander without thinking about the price in blood that had been paid to obtain him?

The noibat gave no answer, just watched Ash with those golden eyes.

Ash felt the words on his tongue, the words that would change his future, and knew he didn't have the will to stop them. "I'll buy him."

The hunter loosened his grip on the noibat. The pokémon flapped over to land on Ash's shoulder, his warm fur brushing against Ash's neck. Ash thought he felt a scratchy lick.

"Oh?" the hunter asked. "Do you have the cash?"

"More cash than a noibat-meal would get you. I have enough for a charmander. I'll pay you half of that."

The hunter inclined his head. "I'll cut the deal. You're going to need the remaining money for neurotech anyway." The hunter began to walk off and called back to him, "Let me grab the pokéball."

Ash picked the bat off his shoulder and held him in his arms. Noibat craned his neck to peer up at him, making a noise that sounded like a question mark.

He shook his head and laughed a little. "Together we're not much, are we? A refugee and an addict." Here he paused for a moment, gazing a Noibat speculatively before dropping his voice to a mere whisper in the quiet dark. "But I want to be so much more than I am. I want to prove I can be strong. I want the respect all the great trainers have. Do you . . . think you could help me achieve that?"

Noibat – a fire in his eyes that reflected Ash's own – nodded.

And Ash thought of lost opportunities and gained ones and wondered if this tiny twist in the pit of his stomach was hope.


End file.
